Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mattis: "Trump has the mind of a fifth or sixth grader"

I read a book, "Skyscraper Dreams" over the weekend about NYC developers. It was written in the late 80s-early 90s. The chapter about Trump really stuck out, At least according to the author Trump seems to come across as immature and hot headed but has an uncanny ability to manipulate the media and government bureacracy into imploding and giving him exactly what he wants. Sounds kinds of familiar....

New Woodward book, with detailed and recorded interviews with several high ranking people working in the White House came out today.


Mattis, the Warrior Monk was quoted as saying Trump has the mind of a fifth or sixth grader, not able to understanding basic multi dimensional problems.



Might explain why his daily intelligence briefings are down to half a page, littered with pictures, instead of text.

5th grader with a 160 IQ!!

Trump has never personally filed bankruptcy. (Iirc) A few of his casinos did, when the existing laws made more sense to do so than not.

Oh my how tactful you are. What a pathetic dodge. His companies did go bankrupt. And the bankers in the US wouldn't lend him any more money for they all thought him a BAD risk. How did he rebound? The US bankers thought it was in their best interest to prop him up instead of him totally financially collapsing. And then there was the foreign money that propped him up. Which leads to the who and why.

Dig a little deeper through the BS and you begin to see the BEAR.

...quoted as saying Trump has the mind of a fifth or sixth grader, not able to understanding basic multi dimensional problems.

Oh my how tactful you are. What a pathetic dodge. His companies did go bankrupt. And the bankers in the US wouldn't lend him any more money for they all thought him a BAD risk. How did he rebound? The US bankers thought it was in their best interest to prop him up instead of him totally financially collapsing. And then there was the foreign money that propped him up. Which leads to the who and why.

Dig a little deeper through the BS and you begin to see the BEAR.

There was no dodge. From a dollar and cents perspective it made more sense to use the existing laws as the were written, to the best advantage. Many other businesses did the same thing at the same time for the same reasons. Picking one company and yelling "ah ha! Gotcha now!!" Is flat out stupid. Businesses incorporate, go LLC, and other terms to isolate and insulate themselves personally from the business like a firewall, for much the same reasons. If the business goes down, you don't lose your house and car as well. There is nothing underhanded about it.

Dude, the guy went bankrupt at least four times, and in so doing hurt lots of people. He's a failure.

Dude, the guy went bankrupt at least four times, and in so doing hurt lots of people. He's a failure.

He's a Billionaire and President of the United States. Can I be a failure too? Please??

Stupid pfhukking LIEberal pukes.

Everybody can be a Billionaire... I am a Billionaire... I just won´t show my tax returns. See.. I am Billionaire too..

Are you living in the White House, screwing Melania, and crapping on a gold chitter? If not then you're a dipchit like everybody else.

Dude, the guy went bankrupt at least four times, and in so doing hurt lots of people. He's a failure.

States with the highest bankruptcy rates

1.) Tennessee, 553 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
2.) Alabama, 529 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
3.) Georgia, 483 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
4.) Illinois, 432 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
5.) Utah, 392 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
6.) Indiana, 387 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
7.) Mississippi, 361 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
8.) Kentucky, 345 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
9.) Arkansas, 344 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents
10.) Ohio, 322 bankruptcy filings per 100,000 residents

Wednesday, 29 November 2017
Hospitals Going Bankrupt Thanks to ObamaCare

A large number of hospital bankruptcies is on the horizon — many of them thanks to ObamaCare.

According to Bloomberg:

A wave of hospitals and other medical companies are likely to restructure their debt or file for bankruptcy in the coming year, following the recent spate of failing retailers and energy drillers, according to restructuring professionals. Regulatory changes, technological advances and the rise of urgent-care centers have created a “perfect storm” for health-care companies, said David Neier, a partner in the New York office of law firm Winston & Strawn LLC.

Among those “regulatory changes” are the outgrowths of ObamaCare. By mandating that Americans have health insurance, the law was supposed to solve the problem of hospitals being saddled with bad debt from treating uninsured patients, whom they are required to treat under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986. Of course, as with so many other ObamaCare promises, this one hasn’t quite panned out as advertised.

For one thing, not nearly as many Americans as expected actually ended up insured. A recent Gallup poll found that the uninsured rate among adults today is the highest it’s been since the end of 2014, just one year into ObamaCare’s individual mandate.

One reason that many Americans have decided to forgo insurance is that ObamaCare makes it extremely expensive, particularly for those who are unlikely to need it. Those who decide to buy anyway often opt for policies with high deductibles because their premiums are lower. Unfortunately, noted Bloomberg, “that has translated into more bad debt from customers for hospitals and other providers.”

“Patients are unlikely to pay medical bills that are greater than 5 percent of household income, according to the Advisory Board, a consulting firm to hospitals,” Bloomberg reported last year. “Median household income in the U.S. is at about $53,000, suggesting that when out-of-pocket charges exceed $2,600 hospitals can forget about collecting, said Spencer Perlman, an analyst with Height Securities in Washington.”

“It feels like a sucker punch,” John Henderson, CEO of Texas’ Childress Regional Medical Center, told the news service. “When someone has a really high deductible, effectively they’re still uninsured, and most people in Childress don’t have $5,000 lying around to pay their bills.”

Indeed, small, rural hospitals such as Henderson’s are imploding under “the crushing weight of regulation through” ObamaCare, according to U.S. News & World Report. “The sum total of mandated automation, reporting requirements, shrinking reimbursements and increasing penalties for noncompliance with other mandates has left rural hospitals out in the cold.”

Reimbursements are about to plummet even further. ObamaCare “reduced payments to hospitals that serve a large number of poor and uninsured patients, known as ‘disproportionate share hospitals,’ on the theory that more patients would be insured under the law,” wrote Bloomberg. “Congress delayed those cuts several times, but didn’t do so for the current fiscal year, which may ‘single-handedly throw hospitals into immediate financial distress — many operate on less than one day’s cash,’ [Winston & Strawn’s Neier] said in an interview.”

In short, the increase in the number of insured individuals (who can also afford their deductibles) that was supposed to offset the decrease in reimbursements hasn’t happened, so hospitals will be saddled with nearly as many patients who can’t pay as in pre-ObamaCare days while getting fewer subsidies to offset the cost of their treatment. The results aren’t difficult to predict.

While the rate of bankruptcy filings in general has fallen significantly since 2010, the rate for healthcare companies has increased dramatically, more than tripling this year. The Polsinelli Health Care Services Distress Research index cited ObamaCare “as one of the systemic changes rocking the sector,” reported Bloomberg.

In truth, ObamaCare is just the straw that is bending, if not breaking, the back of the U.S. healthcare system. The rest of the bale consists of subsidies, taxes, mandates, and regulations that have distorted both supply and demand to such an extent that actual market prices in healthcare — with some notable exceptions — are nearly impossible to discern, leading to both shortages and exorbitant costs. ObamaCare certainly needs to go, but many more policy changes also must occur before Americans can once again obtain affordable, quality care.

6 months of Obamacare and I’m Headed Towards Bankruptcy: One Doctor’s Insights
Posted on June 20, 2014 by Drpost

I was a bright, enthusiastic, and hopeful child full of dreams to help others. I fantasized about performing the most challenging and complex surgical techniques and then walking into a room with a humble smile while people greeted me with appreciation, hope, and respect for saving lives. I was offered a full scholarship to MIT for Computer Science and I passed it up to accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical school debt in order to become a surgeon. MIT will you take me back? Please? Is it too late?

OK….. I was a dreamer. I genuinely believed–from the bottom of my heart–that all the brutal physical, mental, and financial sacrifices of training to become a physician would lead to a comfortable and tremendously fulfilling life—financially and emotionally.

Unfortunately, rather than enjoying the fruits of a hard-earned career this year, I noticed an alarming change in the dynamic of my career and where my surgical practice is headed. I tried to convince myself that I was just feeling pessimistic, and that nothing had really changed significantly. However, when I saw that every month my earnings have been declining, I decided that I needed to sit down and evaluate what has been happening to my practice. I focused exclusively on the last 6 months—the exact period since the inception of Obamacare. I sat down and looked at the numbers and trends in detail and I was horrified by the new reality of my private practice. I want to share with you what has been happening around me as a private practice physician since Obamacare was enforced.

The Electronic Medical Records requirement will lead to a 5% increase in my overhead costs. My surgical practice has spent hours looking for an Electronic Medical Records System to avoid penalization by the government. The costs of this new system (even taking into account incentive payments by the government) will raise our operating overhead by at least 5% a year. That will translate to tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for each doctor in our office. E-prescribing now leads to 2 extra hours of work per day for our office.

The number of my Medicaid patients has risen by 12% and the number of private insurance patients has declined by 22%. I must see three to four Medicaid patients to earn the same amount as one of my patients with private insurance

Referring doctor supply is shrinking rapidly. 20% of my referring doctors have left private practice completely! This was the most astonishing and disappointing discovery for me. Several doctors who used to refer me 10 patients a week, on average, have already quit medicine completely. One of my greatest referral sources is now earning 3X as much working as an HMO administrator, and many of my most loyal referring docs have moved to work for hospitals, large medical groups, or HMOs like Kaiser. Referrals of new patients have consequently plummeted dramatically.

Doctors retiring much earlier than before. 5% of my referring doctors retired from medicine in the last six months alone. They were young by retirement standards (in their 50s early 60s)

Concierge practices on the rise. 10% of my referring doctors have decided not to take insurance at all or have decided to practice “concierge medicine” and charge yearly retainers ranging from $500/patient to $20,000/patient. They are seeing fewer patients now and that means fewer surgical referrals. As a surgeon, the concierge model is not a viable option because we don’t usually treat chronic patients.

Emergency Rooms far busier with more (not fewer) uninsured patients. Another shocker. My emergency room on-call work hours at my local hospital have quadrupled and the number of uninsured patients that I have seen on-call has quadrupled as well. I am not sure why, but I am working four times as hard and collecting 75% less from the patients I see through the Emergency Room Panel.

I cannot provide a great education for my kids. I applied for private schools for my son for Kindergarten, because our local public school is not very good. The gifted track at our school system is even behind most regular public schools in other districts. When interviewing for the private schools, my friend who works for one of the admissions offices told me that I should try to hide the fact that I am a doctor. She said, “They rarely accept doctors’ kids (unless they are legacies) because doctors can’t afford the tuition anymore and are pulling their kids out.” She was right–we weren’t accepted to any private schools for my son. One of my patients who is a successful TV producer got his kid into three amazing private schools. My son is 5 years old and reads third grade level books. As a doctor, I cannot even provide my kid with the education he needs?

Increased patient morbidity due to transferring medical care from Physicians to Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants. I have seen a dramatic increase in Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants taking over the jobs of physicians to cut down costs. I have utmost respect for NPs and PAs. However, I have discovered GRAVE problems due to this rapid transfer in medical decision making and treatment to healthcare providers without medical school and residency training. In the last six months, I have seen one Nurse Practitioner misdiagnose a complex toe fracture as “cellulitis.” I have seen a Physician Assistant fail to recognize a patient who was having classic stroke symptoms. I operated urgently on a child who had appendicitis that was misdiagnosed by a Nurse Practitioner as a stomach flu and given Pepto-Bismol. I had two cases where I had to re-suture complex wounds that should have been referred to a surgeon but were repaired by Physician Assistants, and I had a patient who had Stage III breast cancer repeatedly missed by two different Nurse Practitioners who were hired by the hospital to perform breast cancer screenings and the list goes on.

If the California Anti-MICRA Law passes on the November Ballot, I will be forced to shut down my practice. The California Anti-MICRA measure—which raises the pain and suffering cap on malpractice cases exponentially—somehow landed on the November ballot. lf this deceptive law (hiding large financial incentives for frivolous and subjective malpractice lawsuits under the guise of physician safety measures) passes, it will surely force me out of business. I will no longer be able to practice medicine as the rising liability from this law and the rising medical malpractice premiums will completely wipe out my practice.

My revenue as a private practice surgeon is plummeting. This demise in the profitability of my surgical practice due to Obamacare is not a gradual process. These economic and personal losses are RAPID and DRAMATIC. My referral pool is rapidly dwindling. I am no longer able to provide a great education for my own children. My liability costs will skyrocket if this new California liability provision encouraging large payouts for “pain and suffering” lawsuits takes effect.

Doctors:

I sincerely hope that you are not experiencing any of these difficulties and that my personal situation is entirely unique. I hope that I am still a dreamer and that this is just one very long bad dream.

Sincerely,

Once Hopeful Surgeon